


Endless Green

by SLWalker



Category: due South
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:48:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wee vignette about Fraser's brief -- and miserable -- time in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endless Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sproid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sproid/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Sproid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sproid/pseuds/Sproid) in the [DS_C6D_Prompt_Meme](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DS_C6D_Prompt_Meme) collection. 



> The prompt was Fraser backstory. Thus, here it is. I know it's not brilliant, but I've been off the metaphorical horse for awhile. Even so, I hope you like it, Sproid, for I have loved reading your stuff of late.

It wasn't that Fraser didn't try.

It was that Moose Jaw was _flat_. Not flat in rare clearings, where elk or deer would leave tracks in the scrub grass. Not flat in the tundra above the treeline, where he could feel the bite in the air and where life scrabbled and clawed and found space in crack and crevice and those stretches of eternal sunlight.

But prairie flat. Endless green, broken only by the occasional stand of trees. Green and green and more green, and no real variation in the terrain. And his eyes, long since trained to see the clawing of life in the permafrost, and long since trained in wood and mountain and forest floors, _missed things_ here.

Constable Benton Fraser, currently patrolling in unit 4A31, felt hopelessly in over his head. Drowning in this endless green, under the endless blue above.

It wasn't that it was a bad detachment. It echoed many others just like it across the great nation of Canada, at least those down in the lower provinces -- red brick, standardized Crown construction, meant to be easy for a member to navigate if they'd just been transferred. His coworkers were fine enough; most of them were from Ontario, one from British Columbia, and they were always both bemused and genuinely interested when he started waxing poetic about the North.

And wax he did. From nearly the moment he had shown up.

Where in the Territories or the Yukon, he was often quiet and comfortable in his quiet, here in Moose Jaw his skin felt wrong, his uniform too light -- short sleeves? No tie? No parka? -- and the air too thick and warm in summer, and he found himself babbling. Babbling about mountain passes and deep valleys; about how the seasons changed with the lines on a contour map -- summer in the valleys, to fall on the mountainsides, to eternal winter in the peaks -- and about how _quiet_ it was. He was anything but, and he felt embarrassed, but still he couldn't seem to clamp his mouth down around it.

Constable Hedford, a man several years his senior, finally came out with something Fraser must have known but refused to acknowledge, and just said one evening, "That homesick, huh, kid?"

And only then was Fraser able to shut his mouth.

Of course, he tried to deny it to himself. He was a member of the RCMP. Moving, transferring, was an inevitability. Every member knew it. He had signed and taken his oath knowing that he could be placed anywhere, from sea to sea to sea, and that he would serve with dignity and perseverance regardless of where it was. Therefore, being homesick made no sense.

Except, he was.

Here, where he drove a patrol car -- not a truck, not a snowmobile, not his own dog sled (much to the surprise and occasionally chagrin of commanding officers in the past) -- he tried to see the world through his own eyes and only came up disoriented and ill-fitting and wrong. Here, where he had a fairly large detachment and patrolled hundreds of kilometers, working with Moose Jaw's own police service, where he was expected to conduct himself as an ordinary patrolman with no particularly special talent -- what good was following sign on forest floors when the entire world was crops and pasture? -- he felt foolish and too young and too inexperienced. Here, all of the skills of staying alive and well when your nearest neighbor was a day away had little use; here, he was expected to be Andy of Mayberry, not Sam Steele.

Yes. He was homesick.

He sat in his patrol car, running radar, but he already knew that speeders would see his blue-and-white and warn other motorists coming down the long, agonizingly straight, flat highway, and he would prove to be even less effective than he already was. And later, perhaps, he would be called to chase cows back into a pasture fence, or perhaps deal with a group of bored teenagers trying to sneak into a theater, or perhaps he would just drive around and nothing would happen at all.

Someday, he would learn how to carve his own world out of the one around him. But for now, he was homesick and he wanted to be in the mountains, in the woods, on the tundra. Not here. Not like this.

Drowning in green, under endless blue, and longing for home.


End file.
